Shuteye for the Timebroker by Paul di Filippo Read Free Book Online

antediluvian printing press.
    “Can’t rightly say, Billy. He pulled up in a fancy foreign car half an hour ago, and he’s been wandering through town ever since, gaping like a mooncalf. When the kids got out of school for lunch they started following him. Then the adults joined in. Pretty soon, I reckon, he’ll have the whole town trailing along.”
    Billy was about to ask why no one had stopped the stranger and inquired his business when Noonan said, “Can’t stand and talk, Billy, he’s getting away.”
    Noonan rejoined the parade. Billy stood still a moment, then did the same.
    The horde of Blackwooders continued to follow the meandering stranger. Each house he passed seemed to add its trickle of inhabitants to the flow, until Noonan’s prediction was almost fulfilled, and hundreds of citizens obligingly trailed the loudly marveling and still-oblivious man.
    Gradually working their way up the slope of the natural amphitheater in which the town lay, the procession wended its way toward the western outskirts. As Billy noticed where they were heading, he began to grow nervous. They were approaching the very spot where his most important plant grew. It was generally known to the natives that Billy had something going up near the old Mowbray house, but they were too respectful to intrude verbally or physically on his project. Certainly this stranger couldn’t know about it also? No, it had to be coincidence—
    At last, houses growing sparser around them, they reached the Mowbray manse.
    Andrew Mowbray was a sorcerer who had lived during the early 1700s. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been a very good one. When it came time for an inevitable showdown between him and Welcome Goodnight, the other resident mage, Mowbray lost. The climactic battle—during which the figures of the two men could be witnessed one night as gigantic white shadows against a cloudy sky—had been the last time anyone had ever seen Mowbray.
    After his disappearance, his house had stood vacant for many years. Eventually, new inhabitants dared to move into the desirable property. They didn’t stay long, however; nor did any others who tried over the next two hundred years. Finally no one could be found who would dare dwell in the house. It had been vacant for fifty years.
    Now the many-gabled house stood in the center of its weedy lot, surrounded by a picket fence from which the paint had all weathered off and most of the pickets had fallen. Thick woods began at the rear of the property, and it was not far within those trees that Billy had his little plot of special land.
    The stranger came to a halt before the shuttered, decaying house. With his back to his neglected audience, he placed his hands on his wide hips and stared for several minutes at the stark building. The crowd waited with its breath held for the next startling actions of this anomalous figure.
    He didn’t disappoint them. Throwing up his pudgy hands he shouted, “This is it!”
    The crowd jumped as one.
    The fat man whirled around and, for the first time, directly addressed the expectant Blackwooders.
    “Freddie Cordovan,” he said, pulling a wallet from his rear pants pocket and flashing an official-looking gold badge. “State Film Bureau. Friends, you are in luck.
    “We’re gonna make a movie here!”
     
    * * *
     
    Florence Budd was an old maid. An old old maid. She lived alone in a small, one-room house on Nightshade Lane, far from the physical and social center of Blackwood Beach. Her house resembled a pack animal that had been overburdened for too many years: a prospector’s donkey that had ascended the Grand Canyon one time too many; a nomad’s camel that had been mercilessly driven back and forth across the Sahara; a peasant’s water buffalo bent from years beneath the yoke. Her little cottage had slanted walls that were threatening to pop out of their window frames like seeds squeezed from a grape. Her roof of wooden slates, where soil had lodged over the years,